SOURCE: "Robert Greene's Ciceronis Amor: Fictional Biography in the Romance Genre," in Studies in the Novel, Vol. 6, No. 3, Fall, 1974, pp. 256–67.

Below, Larson examines Ciceronis Amor: Tullies Love, surveying its literary context, early popularity, and emphasis on friendship.

There are, at present, strong signs of renewed interest in the prose fiction of Robert Greene. New editions of Pandosto and A Notable Discovery of Cozenage in a widely-used college text, a lengthy chapter on the prose in a recent commentary on Elizabethan fiction, a spate of doctoral dissertations on Greene, and a proposed new edition of his complete works all testify to the existence of an overdue reconsideration of Greene as one of the most interesting and versatile of Elizabethan authors.¹

It is the purpose of this paper to further that reconsideration by focusing on one of Greene's most popular works, Ciceronis Amor: Tullies Love, in an attempt to understand...